It is the breathing he misses the most.
The too-full feeling when the lungs stretched to accommodate a deep breath, the ribcage quivering. The age-old way he’d drag in a shuddering breath to buy himself time. He’d taken it for granted. He’d taken it all for granted.
And he’d been a coward to seek out the woman he loved, a coward to beg her to make it stop when he had already resigned himself to a lifetime of pain. Guilt, shame, the specific ache associated with knowing that he should have done more. Should have fought harder. Should have sunk his teeth into whatever inch of flesh he could reach.
But he feels no guilt now. No shame. No pain. He does not miss the thrill of being alive. Not even the breathing, not really. The nostalgia he feels for the way the air could make his ribs ache in is something fabricated, an idea. A distant, water-stained memory. Same as everything else.
He wanders now for the same reason he has always wandered. Because he can. Because it is the only thing that has ever come naturally. And isn’t it a blessing that now the muscles do not ache, he does not tire, he feels no need to stop for food or water. There is no heart to beat loud in his ears. No, it sits useless, a clenched fist, frozen in the cavern of his chest.
His wandering brings him to the meadow, if only because this is always where he ends up. By accident or design, he does not know. But it is here that he found his mother, it is here that he found Kennice. It is here where the sun hangs fat and bright, casting him in a glow that illustrates every thing that has gone wrong. No doubt it casts the eyes in a harsh light and they are dull, empty.
He stops on a grassy knoll where the earth begins to slow downward. And if he needed sleep, he might have lowered his useless body into the soft meadowgrass and laid down his weary head. But he is not tired, does not want for sleep, and he would not have felt the tickle of that sweet grass anyway.
So he stands, absolutely motionless, for he cannot even feel the flies that land on his flank. He may as well not be there at all.
